Jade Helm 15, the multi-state, two-month U.S. Army Special Operations Command training exercise, began today, but the conspiracy theories surrounding it have collectively become a story unto themselves — with wild theories to include FEMA death domes and ice-cream-truck morgues.

The Army calls Jade Helm a standard training operation for unconventional warfare. But some have “connected the dots,” and the military’s true motives remain unstated: to either engage in an occupation or at least prepare for war within the U.S.

Whether you have concerns about Jade Helm or simply find the theories and ensuing furor and paranoia entertaining, below are the most striking theories. Meanwhile, skeptoid.com has a primer for anyone looking for more benign explanations to the alleged evidence of nefarious plotting — for those unworried about being labeled “sheeple” by conspiracy theorists.

FEMA Death Domes:

A hurricane dome in Florida in 2012, a structure that was being built in part with money from FEMA. (Photo: David J. Phillip/AP)

Some have alleged that new dome-shaped facilities are being built by FEMA for the purpose of detaining insurrectionists. While the Associated Press has written about the shelters, Jade Helm conspiracy theorists have latched onto FEMA Death Domes. Though purportedly hurricane and storm shelters that can protect a large number of people (and in cases provide community facilities like gymnasiums), conspiracy theorists argue that walls designed to withstand hurricanes and tornados make great prisons, and have linked them to Jade Helm.

If you are going to start a war, you need a place to put the bodies, right? Some conspiracy theorists believe Blue Bell Ice Cream trucks could serve as mobile morgues. While none of the conspirators at Blue Bell balked at the idea and publicized the plot, sleuths found evidence: film of about a dozen Blue Bell trucks traveling on the same highway as a military convoy, apparently I-25 in Colorado.

Blue Bell closed it’s Denver-area distribution center near I-25 in May, the same month as the video was posted. Fort Carson sits about 75 miles down I-25 from Denver. The company has said the convoy convergence was a coincidence. Blue Bell has been reeling from a recall and production shut-down following discovery of listeria monocytogenes in its ice cream. Multiple deaths in recent years have been linked to the outbreak. Still, a conspiracy-minded site called the company’s first-ever recall suspicious and the trucks’ proximity to a military convoy “creepy” while also linking the company to the Bush family and defense contracts, but admitted it couldn’t verify whether the trucks were preparing to be mobile morgues or merely transporting food or just the trucks themselves from a closing facility.

The world’s largest retailer has become an essential element to any Jade Helm conspiracy site. A handful of Walmarts — two in Texas and one each in Florida, California and Oklahoma — suddenly closed in April for six months, with the company saying they needed to make plumbing repairs. There are actually two groups with conspiracy theories, which note that city officials in the cities said Walmart wasn’t filing for permits for repairs, according to a Florida ABC affiliate. One group expressing doubt is organized labor: some of the closings were allegedly punitive and retaliatory measures against workers agitating for better wages and rights, something they’ve been convicted of doing in Canada.

But Jade Helm theorists remain unsatisfied with either explanation of the closing of five out of more than 4,000 U.S. stores. (In addition, they cite razor wire protecting the roof of an abandoned Walmart in Cincinnati, though some noted it is in a high crime area and that copper and HVAC equipment would be a target for thieves.) Jade Helm theorists say the military plans to enact martial law and use the stores as processing locations or possibly to control the food supply in poorer areas. A theory also involves China using the sites as command centers, as it allegedly tries to replace the dollar as the global currency with its own and disarm Americans during a hostile takeover of the nation.

An unclassified document that outlines a US Army training exercise scheduled for this summer includes a color-coded map that refers to Texas as “hostile territory” and calls a portion of California an “insurgent pocket,” leading a certain fringe on the internet to claim the exercise is really a dress rehearsal for a government plot to declare martial law.

The training exercise, known as Jade Helm 15, is scheduled to take place between July 15 and September 15 across parts of Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and will involve Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other Special Ops forces. The uproar is over a slideshow presentation that outlines the effects the exercises might have on local populations. The US Army would not confirm the legitimacy of the document.

Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones have been screeching about imminent martial law for years.

The above banner is taken from his InfoWars website in the year 2000. (Read More)

On the Sleuth Journal, a website that describes itself as an independent alternative media organization and also sells “preparedness and survival items,” author Dave Hodges said the drill was actually about “the brutal martial subjugation of the people of Texas, Utah and Southern California who have risen up against some unspecified tyranny.”

“A careful analysis reveals how this drill is connected to Army policies associated with the confinement of detainees in what is commonly called FEMA camps!” Hodge wrote, describing a conspiracy theory in which the government imprisons citizens in FEMA disaster camps. “This drill is undoubtedly the most frightening thing to occur on American soil since the Civil War.”

Infowars, the conspiracy-minded site founded by Alex Jones, also published a story on Jade Helm 15, calling it a plan for the “brutal martial law takeover of America [that] labels Texas and Utah as ‘hostile’ states due to their strong cultural identities.”

Who is old enough to remember Y2K? I remember it well (translation: i’m old).

Y2K is an acronym for “Year 2000,” or, as it was also known – “The Year 2000 problem, the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K.” (source) It was the moment when the clocks struck 12:00 AM on Janury 1, 2000 and how it might affect every aspect of our lives. Why?

The year 2000 was a problem for many computers because many computer programs stored years using only the last two digits of the year; for example, 1980 was stored as “80”, the year 1999 was stored as “99” and the year 2000 would be stored as “00”.

Do you see the problem? Not only did such systems view the year 2000 as “00”, but they also viewed the year 1900 as “00”. Imagine what would happen to half your programs if your computer suddenly thought the current year (2013) was actually the year 1913. Your calendar program, your watch, your smart phone and many other programs we rely on would suddenly be all wacked out. Imagine what would happen to the banking system if this glitch occurred. Would you be able to access your money? Would all your checks suddenly bounce? (On the other hand, maybe the banks would suddenly give us 100 years of accrued interest. But i digress …)

Now imagine if such a glitch were to occur in bigger systems like nuclear electric plants and nuclear weapons? What might go wrong? This is what had a lot of people in a near state of panic.

Would telephone systems shutdown? Would the electric grid turn off across the country – plunging all of us into darkness for an indeterminant amount of time? Would trains run on schedule? Would the air traffic control system lose control? Would our nuclear arsenal behave in some unpredicted manner and cause WWIII? Would the nuclear arsenal in some other country malfunction and bomb us?

It seemed nobody knew for sure what would – or would not – happen. People were concerned and scared.

Enter my favorite moron – Alex Jones.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the clocks were due to change over to the year 2000, The Alex Jones show engaged in some of the most negligent, egregious and irresponsible scare mongering ever. I don’t know of a worse case than this.

In the 3 hours Jones was on the air, he made every conceivable claim of catastrophe imaginable. He took everything people were fearing about Y2K and he claimed those fears were materializing. Everything from cash machines failing, nuclear power plants shutting down, concentration camps (with shackles) being readied, empty grocery store shelves, gas stations out of gas, Martial Law declared, the military serving search warrants in 77 Texas counties – to an actual nuclear missile attack!!!!!!!!

And did any of this actually occur? No. None of it. People were so frightened they reportedly headed for the hills (literally) and got physically sick.

Bill Cooper’s original broadcast was 3 hours long. In the Alex Jones recording i present below, except for the opening 30 seconds, i have edited out all of Bill Cooper’s narratives so you can hear Alex Jones uninterrupted in all his despicable glory.

As i was going through the audio, i noticed breaks in the Alex Jones audio that i assume were done by Bill Cooper’s editing team in preparation for broadcast. Where ever i believed there was an edit i added a half-second “beep” sound. This is to help avoid confusion as the conversation would sometimes abruptly change topics. So listen for the beeps (you can’t miss them).

Below the audio you will find a complete transcript of notes i made of what to expect in the audio. This will help you follow along. Where ever you see the word “Regurgitation,” that is my own shorthand to indicate it is a previously mentioned point being repeated by Jones – a tactic he uses to give the impression he has a pile of information. Any words [inside brackets] are commentaries i made for myself.

Believe me, this is an audio clip Alex Jones wishes would go away.

Enjoy!

:)

Mason I. Bilderberg.

P.S. If anybody knows where i can find a copy of the full 3 hour Alex Jones Show from 12/31/1999 please let me know.

1:39 Pennsylvania nuclear plant (Limerick Generating Station) has been shut down [implied because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below]

1:49 The shelves (In TX) are empty of water and gas stations are running out of fuel

3:12 The government in Washington D.C. has set up a $50M command bunker that is hooked into FEMA and they can take over all the shortwave (radio), AM/FM radio stations and all television and other broadcast stations

3:34 The police and military [presumably nationwide] are on high alert

3:41 The military are highly visible [presumably in the streets]

3:45 Trains of military equipment moving into Austin, TX

3:53 The airport (Robert Mueller Airport) will be used as a massive holding facility [ala concentration camps]

6:00 They (Russia) have deployed their missiles and submarines against us (America).

6:09 Vladimir Putin, who just took over as Russian President, has “taken the codes off” Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (The Russian nuclear arsenal no longer requires a secret code to initiate a nuclear missile attack on America.)

6:25 Discussing America being hit with a nuclear first-strike and the ensuing annihilation.

7:27 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania Electric Company (PECO), Limerick Generating Station (here and here) was shutdown [presumably because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below].

7:38 Doesn’t challenge a caller paraphrasing (Colonel) Bo Gritz who said, that Russia said, if their (Russia) power goes out they will blame us and they (Russia) would set off their nuclear arsenal.

8:01 The Russians are threatening to nuke us every, single week.

8:25 Currencies around the world are plunging

8:39 Gas stations in America are out of gas

8:58 American’s are standing up as Russia threatens to attack us with nuclear weapons

9:02 Nuclear power plants are being shutdown

9:07 The military is “running around” with the police and the FBI saying terrorism is imminent [the takeover is beginning]

9:25 “They” have activated a powerful, cold war, radar system in the north pole region [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] that is affecting shortwave (radio)

9:46 Military traffic is EVERYWHERE

9:52 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems (presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack) and nuclear systems are up.

10:07 Fresno (California?) is blacked out, he (Jones) is off the internet

10:25 [Scare tactic, Survivalist Commercial]

11:03 “America is under siege right now.”

11:14 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

11:33 Egypt is having a run on the banks

11:45 Regurgitation: The power in Fresno (California?) is down, he is off the internet

11:50 Regurgitation: Cash machines and ATMs in Europe are having problems

12:03 Martial Law signs are posted on highway 65 in Arkansas by the Arkansas Transportation Department

21:18 There are “shackles on the ground, concreted into the ground” at Robert Mueller Airport – like a slave galley.

21:42 New Zealand is having power outages

21:57 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:33 Regurgitation: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us

22:50 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:55 The power is off in 8 different areas across the country

22:58 A lot of cable systems aren’t working

23:01 Satellites are down

23:09 “Minor fault (???) struck two nuclear power plants in Japan just seconds after the clock ticked into 2000 …”

23:25 Anybody near a nuclear power plant should pack up and go someplace else.

23:37 The store shelves are bare in Austin, TX.

23:43 Regurgitation: Gas is running out.

23:44 They’re announcing on the news that, “if you’re bad they’re going to put you in a … they’re going to bolt you to a pipe coming out of the ground at the airport (Robert Mueller Airport) in some cold hangar.”

24:04 “The military is serving search warrants now in 77 Texas counties.”

24:08 Regurgitation: “We got nuclear power plants shutting down.”

24:20 Regurgitation: The Russians are threatening to nuke us RIGHT NOW.

28:36 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

28:57 The night before (12/30/99), anything and everything on the flight line at Selfridge Air National Guard Base was put into the air and was constantly in the air. [i.e. The U.S. is preparing for a nuclear attack]

29:11 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] are turned on.

29:21 The Russians are not the only ones we need to be concerned about … we should worry about the Chinese too.

20:24 We also need to be worried about Germany.

29:58 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

You don’t have to be mad to create conspiracy theories, but it certainly helps, new research suggests.

Just believing in them indicates you are more likely to be paranoid or mentally ill, a Victoria University study shows.

Widely held conspiracy theories range from harmless ones, such as the belief that the Moon landings were faked, to more dangerous delusions such as the one in Nigeria that polio vaccines were a Western plot to sterilise people. That led to vaccination crews being murdered and thousands dying from disease.

Clinical psychologist Darshani Kumareswaran is delving in to the psychology of conspiracy belief, and has found some believers are likely to endorse far-fetched plots in an effort to make sense of chaotic situations beyond their control.

Kumareswaran, who graduated from Victoria with a PhD in psychology this week, wanted to find out what made people more likely to believe in, or come up with, conspiracy theories – and whether the process was linked to mental illness.

Avid conspiracy theorists can put themselves under intense psychological strain with their tendency towards paranoid thinking and delusional beliefs, causing mental strain even when a conspiracy theory turns out to be a verified plot.

She also looked behind the common public image of the conspiracy theorist as a crackpot.

Despite evidence of verified conspiracies, such as the Watergate scandal, the public viewed conspiracy theorists in as negative a light as they did convicted criminals, she said.

“For the label to be so negatively rated by the public is quite a powerful finding.”

Study participants were asked to recall a situation in which they had no control, describe it in detail, and write it down. They were then put in a “psychological space” in which they felt powerlessness and were given 24 pictures that looked like snowy television screens.

Half featured obscured objects such as a chair or tent, the other half nothing.

Those who scored highly on a form of psychopathology known as schizotypy were more likely to see an object in the images where there was none, indicating they were more likely to make connections between unrelated things.

“I also found that someone who creates conspiracy theories is more likely to have some form of psychopathology, or mental illness such as . . .

What is a conspiracy theory, why do people believe in them, and why do they tend to proliferate? Why does belief in one conspiracy correlate to belief in others? What are the triggers of belief, and how does group identity factor into it? How can one tell the difference between a true conspiracy and a false one? For the answers, download this free booklet, created by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse, the founders of Skeptic magazine and your Skeptics Society.

The video shows a large convoy of tractor trailer trucks traveling on Virginia’s Interstate 64 being escorted by State Troopers. Take a look:

As i watched the video i couldn’t think of why these trucks would be driving in such a formation (I’ve included the answer at the bottom of this post). I didn’t think much of it, really. Most people didn’t think much of it. That’s because when most people don’t know who, what, where, why or when, they simply say “I don’t know.” But not conspiracists …

When confronted with an unknown, conspiracists immediately fill their information void with something they want to believe (usually some kind of apocalyptic plan by lizard people to starve, kill, destroy and otherwise control earth people). It’s this ability by conspiracists to build a confirmation bias echo chamber out of absolutely nothing that i find really, really entertaining.

So now, for your entertainment, here are just a few of the comments i found associated with this video. Enjoy the lunacy.

Belief is only useful where facts do not exist. Where facts exist, they are all that matter when attempting to assess a situation. Anyone who latches onto a story that happens to fit a smaller set of facts while ignoring the possible implications of other facts is limiting their reasoning to comfortable stories rather than opening their mind to the nuance of reality. Cultivating conspiracy theories is worse than beta, it’s worse than white knighting—it is one step away from being a complete tool.

Oneitis is an attraction towards a single potential partner to the exclusion of other possible partners; a crush gone out of control and turned into something that’s a borderline obsession.(more)

Let me restate myself for emphasis, you’re a moron if you decide to ignore facts that are inconvenient to your preferred narrative so that you can maintain a comfortable or ego-invested lie. This is the foundation of red pill truth. Don’t give up your reasoning and attention to detail when the first beta masquerading as a man tries to claim that something is a hoax or false-flag event. This isn’t much different than listening to your favorite female oneitis target tell you how to be attractive for her when you’re 18 years old. Sure, it feels good when a woman tells you how to be attractive to women, and her story feels like it fits the facts, but anyone who has digested the red pill knows that situation is like drinking poison.

Just because you believe the world is ending, doesn’t mean that there’s a US-government-generated earthquake targeted at you specifically. The conspiracy theorist mindset is wholly narcissistic, unable to accept that entirely bad situations can occur purely by random chance or (as is more often the case) by absolute human incompetence. This way of thinking is actually attractive to the remnants of the human brain that are primal, the old, lizard brain that tells us to go find a woman to have sex with. Worse yet, it really strokes our primitive egos when we feel like we know something that other people do not. These lines of thinking are attractive because they are extremely useful for keeping us safe in situations that could potentially go out of control quickly. Yet, this form of thought is an unmitigated disaster when all that is required is a little reading, thinking, and acceptance of all facts available for a rational explanation to present itself.

The human mind wants to believe something

If you’re walking alone down a dark alley in a seedy part of a large modern city in the middle of the night, would you consider getting mugged to be a part of a grand conspiracy against you? Probably not, but you would be hard-pressed to explain exactly what circumstances led to your unfortunate encounter. In fact, you would have no facts on your mugging save the visual identity of your attacker at best. In this situation your mind would be free to come up with all kinds of stories that fit your limited set of facts. Yet you never see humans attribute muggings to the NSA, or the CIA, or any other clandestine organization of the world’s governments. Why is this? Because our minds (for at least some of us) can accept the fact that we placed ourselves into a vulnerable situation and someone else took advantage of us. Our shared experience or human consciousness lets us understand that large cities have lots of people who want to do unsavory things to other people if they feel they can get away with it.

Gang stalking is a highly coordinated operation, usually by a counterintelligence entity, to intimidate dissenters through a mob of watchers, harassers, prank callers, hackers, and irritants. To be gang stalked is to suspect everyone, to feel eyes fall upon you and not be sure whether it’s just another person in the grocery aisle or an agent paid to induce that exact feeling of uncertainty in your heart. And while gang stalking can be coordinated by anyone, from a personal enemy to the Mafia, the coordination tactics enabled by modern communication technologies and sheer computing power is most available to large corporations and governmental entities.

Gang stalking is also nonsense.

Gang Stalking Youtube Video – Window Into Delusion

Watch this Youtube video and you’ll immediately understand why:

The transparent paranoia in this Youtube video is evident to all but the gang stalking initiate.

Gang stalking, as experienced by most of its victims, is delusional. It’s the most serious conspiracy theory not because it reflects reality, but because gang stalking is the bridge between conspiracy theorizing as a hobby, and conspiracy theorizing as an all-consuming mental illness.

Here Be Dragons is a 40 minute video introduction to critical thinking. This video is on my “must watch” list for skeptics and critical thinkers :)

Most people fully accept paranormal and pseudoscientific claims without critique as they are promoted by the mass media. Here Be Dragons offers a toolbox for recognizing and understanding the dangers of pseudoscience, and appreciation for the reality-based benefits offered by real science.

Who is old enough to remember Y2K? I remember it well (translation: i’m old).

Y2K is an acronym for “Year 2000,” or, as it was also known – “The Year 2000 problem, the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K.” (source) It was the moment when the clocks struck 12:00 AM on Janury 1, 2000 and how it might affect every aspect of our lives. Why?

The year 2000 was a problem for many computers because many computer programs stored years using only the last two digits of the year; for example, 1980 was stored as “80”, the year 1999 was stored as “99” and the year 2000 would be stored as “00”.

Do you see the problem? Not only did such systems view the year 2000 as “00”, but they also viewed the year 1900 as “00”. Imagine what would happen to half your programs if your computer suddenly thought the current year (2013) was actually the year 1913. Your calendar program, your watch, your smart phone and many other programs we rely on would suddenly be all wacked out. Imagine what would happen to the banking system if this glitch occurred. Would you be able to access your money? Would all your checks suddenly bounce? (On the other hand, maybe the banks would suddenly give us 100 years of accrued interest. But i digress …)

Now imagine if such a glitch were to occur in bigger systems like nuclear electric plants and nuclear weapons? What might go wrong? This is what had a lot of people in a near state of panic.

Would telephone systems shutdown? Would the electric grid turn off across the country – plunging all of us into darkness for an indeterminant amount of time? Would trains run on schedule? Would the air traffic control system lose control? Would our nuclear arsenal behave in some unpredicted manner and cause WWIII? Would the nuclear arsenal in some other country malfunction and bomb us?

It seemed nobody knew for sure what would – or would not – happen. People were concerned and scared.

Enter my favorite moron – Alex Jones.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the clocks were due to change over to the year 2000, The Alex Jones show engaged in some of the most negligent, egregious and irresponsible scare mongering ever. I don’t know of a worse case than this.

In the 3 hours Jones was on the air, he made every conceivable claim of catastrophe imaginable. He took everything people were fearing about Y2K and he claimed those fears were materializing. Everything from cash machines failing, nuclear power plants shutting down, concentration camps (with shackles) being readied, empty grocery store shelves, gas stations out of gas, Martial Law declared, the military serving search warrants in 77 Texas counties – to an actual nuclear missile attack!!!!!!!!

And did any of this actually occur? No. None of it. People were so frightened they reportedly headed for the hills (literally) and got physically sick.

Bill Cooper’s original broadcast was 3 hours long. In the Alex Jones recording i present below, except for the opening 30 seconds, i have edited out all of Bill Cooper’s narratives so you can hear Alex Jones uninterrupted in all his despicable glory.

As i was going through the audio, i noticed breaks in the Alex Jones audio that i assume were done by Bill Cooper’s editing team in preparation for broadcast. Where ever i believed there was an edit i added a half-second “beep” sound. This is to help avoid confusion as the conversation would sometimes abruptly change topics. So listen for the beeps (you can’t miss them).

Below the audio you will find a complete transcript of notes i made of what to expect in the audio. This will help you follow along. Where ever you see the word “Regurgitation,” that is my own shorthand to indicate it is a previously mentioned point being repeated by Jones – a tactic he uses to give the impression he has a pile of information. Any words [inside brackets] are commentaries i made for myself.

Believe me, this is an audio clip Alex Jones wishes would go away.

Enjoy!

:)

Mason I. Bilderberg.

P.S. If anybody knows where i can find a copy of the full 3 hour Alex Jones Show from 12/31/1999 please let me know.

1:39 Pennsylvania nuclear plant (Limerick Generating Station) has been shut down [implied because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below]

1:49 The shelves (In TX) are empty of water and gas stations are running out of fuel

3:12 The government in Washington D.C. has set up a $50M command bunker that is hooked into FEMA and they can take over all the shortwave (radio), AM/FM radio stations and all television and other broadcast stations

3:34 The police and military [presumably nationwide] are on high alert

3:41 The military are highly visible [presumably in the streets]

3:45 Trains of military equipment moving into Austin, TX

3:53 The airport (Robert Mueller Airport) will be used as a massive holding facility [ala concentration camps]

6:00 They (Russia) have deployed their missiles and submarines against us (America).

6:09 Vladimir Putin, who just took over as Russian President, has “taken the codes off” Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (The Russian nuclear arsenal no longer requires a secret code to initiate a nuclear missile attack on America.)

6:25 Discussing America being hit with a nuclear first-strike and the ensuing annihilation.

7:27 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania Electric Company (PECO), Limerick Generating Station (here and here) was shutdown [presumably because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below].

7:38 Doesn’t challenge a caller paraphrasing (Colonel) Bo Gritz who said, that Russia said, if their (Russia) power goes out they will blame us and they (Russia) would set off their nuclear arsenal.

8:01 The Russians are threatening to nuke us every, single week.

8:25 Currencies around the world are plunging

8:39 Gas stations in America are out of gas

8:58 American’s are standing up as Russia threatens to attack us with nuclear weapons

9:02 Nuclear power plants are being shutdown

9:07 The military is “running around” with the police and the FBI saying terrorism is imminent [the takeover is beginning]

9:25 “They” have activated a powerful, cold war, radar system in the north pole region [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] that is affecting shortwave (radio)

9:46 Military traffic is EVERYWHERE

9:52 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems (presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack) and nuclear systems are up.

10:07 Fresno (California?) is blacked out, he (Jones) is off the internet

10:25 [Scare tactic, Survivalist Commercial]

11:03 “America is under siege right now.”

11:14 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

11:33 Egypt is having a run on the banks

11:45 Regurgitation: The power in Fresno (California?) is down, he is off the internet

11:50 Regurgitation: Cash machines and ATMs in Europe are having problems

12:03 Martial Law signs are posted on highway 65 in Arkansas by the Arkansas Transportation Department

21:18 There are “shackles on the ground, concreted into the ground” at Robert Mueller Airport – like a slave galley.

21:42 New Zealand is having power outages

21:57 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:33 Regurgitation: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us

22:50 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:55 The power is off in 8 different areas across the country

22:58 A lot of cable systems aren’t working

23:01 Satellites are down

23:09 “Minor fault (???) struck two nuclear power plants in Japan just seconds after the clock ticked into 2000 …”

23:25 Anybody near a nuclear power plant should pack up and go someplace else.

23:37 The store shelves are bare in Austin, TX.

23:43 Regurgitation: Gas is running out.

23:44 They’re announcing on the news that, “if you’re bad they’re going to put you in a … they’re going to bolt you to a pipe coming out of the ground at the airport (Robert Mueller Airport) in some cold hangar.”

24:04 “The military is serving search warrants now in 77 Texas counties.”

24:08 Regurgitation: “We got nuclear power plants shutting down.”

24:20 Regurgitation: The Russians are threatening to nuke us RIGHT NOW.

28:36 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

28:57 The night before (12/30/99), anything and everything on the flight line at Selfridge Air National Guard Base was put into the air and was constantly in the air. [i.e. The U.S. is preparing for a nuclear attack]

29:11 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] are turned on.

29:21 The Russians are not the only ones we need to be concerned about … we should worry about the Chinese too.

20:24 We also need to be worried about Germany.

29:58 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

Start this video to continue your training:

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

In 1871, a man named Albert Pike published a book called Morals and Dogma.

Conspiracists call this book a manifesto, a primary doctrine for Masons and, contained within its pages is absolute proof Albert Pike was a Satanist who wrote secret Satan worship into the degrees of the Scottish Rite.

Who is Albert Pike? What is his book about? What was the extent of his influence? Do Freemasons worship Satan?

New from the “Wow, You People Really Get Upset About Everything, Don’t You?” department, we have a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the Evil Government Agents are marking our mailboxes with color-coded dots for some ominous purpose.

The dots, which are about three inches across, are either bright red, blue, or yellow. And according to the aforementioned wackmobile, the whole idea is so that they can keep track of who is headed for termination:

More and more people are reporting their mail box or their house has been marked with color stickers or marks. Are these the FEMA death camp markings for foreign troops to gather us when the government declares martial law? In some area, even the local police & utility companies don’t even know why they are there.

Minister Paul shows us how FEMA is marking his mailbox.

He then follows it up with a couple of videos, showing his mailbox and a neighbor’s mailbox that have stickers. And lo, one of them was red and one of them was blue, as was foretold by the prophecy. Worse still, one of the mailboxes had the lock forced. He talked to a guy at the post office, who said that the blue sticker meant that there was a forwarding order on that address. The guy who made the video, who calls himself “Master Paul,” draws from this the following breathtaking conclusion:

If blue means “forward,” why is (the neighbor’s) red? There are a lot of conspiracy theories on YouTube. This is not a conspiracy theory. You’re seeing it. Red and blue!

Yup. We saw it. Red and blue. And therefore FEMA death camps and martial law and public floggings of American citizens, or something.

To hammer home the point, we’re shown the following map, illustrating where stickered mailboxes have been reported to Master Paul et al.:

Holy crap. This woman accuses a postal worker of stalking her! Here is the video she took of her confrontation with the poor guy.

Is this lady serious?

If she IS serious, this video shows how one wackadoo’s delusions can escalate into somebody getting hurt. What if she was prone to violence and she truly believed this poor guy was stalking her? She could have pulled out a weapon.

If i were this postal worker i would have put some space between myself and her delusion by closing the truck door. I certainly wouldn’t have turned my back on this nut job.

Although conspiracy theories can pop up anywhere in the world, they’ve become an integral part of American culture and history. Even the founding of the country was steeped in conspiracy theory, specifically that King George III planned to deprive the colonies of their rights. There’s nothing more American than not trusting your government, especially considering the number of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true.

10 • The US Government Turned Its Citizens Into Collateral

According to this conspiracy theory pushed by members of the so-called “redemption movement,” the US government turned its own citizens into collateral in 1933 when it stopped using the gold standard so it could keep borrowing money. Supposedly, this made all American citizens unwitting slaves of international Jewish bankers.

As movement leader Roger Elvick explained, every time a new citizen is born, the government awards his “straw man,” or twin, with a secret bank account worth $630,000. He also claims that citizens have the right to access their twins’ bank accounts, which can be done by performing certain legal maneuvers.

Of course, members who attempted to access their secret bank accounts often found themselves in trouble with the law. Elvick himself did prison time during most of the 1990s for issuing more than $1 million in bad checks and filing falsified IRS forms. He found himself in trouble again in 2005 when he was charged with forgery and extortion.

9 • The North American Union

In another nutty conspiracy theory involving the New World Order, there are those who believe that insidious forces are working behind the scenes to turn the US, Canada, and Mexico into one superstate called the North American Union (NAU). The system will be modeled after the European Union and eventually lead to a one-world government.

Adherents believe that this conspiracy includes building a superhighway that would stretch from Yukon to the Yucatan, the promotion of a consolidated currency called the “amero,” and the installation of Spanish as the primary language. They also claim that the existence of legitimate groups like the North American Free Trade Agreement and Council on Foreign Relations is proof that the creation of the NAU is already in full swing. As to who the culprits could be, it is said that industrialists are behind this scheme, since they stand to benefit the most from a free market.

8 • Black Genocide

Given the oppression and discrimination that the black population of the US has faced for hundreds of years, it was not hard to see this coming. This conspiracy theory refers to an alleged institutionalized policy by the US government to decrease or wipe out the African-American population using a variety of medical and other methods. Aside from implementing harsh socioeconomic conditions, this also includes promoting birth control, performing abortions and sterilizations, and abetting lynchings and murders against the black community.

The term first came into existence in the 1950s, when the Civil Rights Congress presented its petition to the United Nations for relief from what it called the government-sponsored genocide of black people. It later entered the popular lexicon after the introduction of the birth control pill and subsequent legalization of abortion. It has since become a favorite rallying cry for activists and conspiracy theorists alike any time widespread persecution of the black community is perceived.

7 • The US Government Is Operating On Maritime/Military Law

Proponents of this theory, including the notoriously litigious “sovereign citizens movement,” contend that a massive conspiracy changed the original government, which operated on common and constitutional law, into one that observes maritime/military law. Unlike the first government, which allowed its citizens complete freedom, the second stripped them of all rights and only conferred upon them privileges designed to make them dependent on the government.

They also believe that the judicial system has been fully aware of the insidious changes all this time but prefer to keep silent to continue enslaving the people. The proof of its complicity is supposedly validated by the presence of gold-fringed US flags that fly over courthouses and other federal buildings. According to theorists, this is a military flag, an assertion that the Flag Research Center has refuted. This outlandish belief has led to numerous run-ins with the law for believers, with occasionally deadly results.

6 • The Constitution Has Been Suspended Since 1933

According to prominent patriot movement member Eugene Schroder in his book The Constitution: Fact or Fiction, President Franklin Roosevelt allegedly suspended the Constitution when he signed the Emergency Banking Relief Act in 1933, which amended the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. This supposedly allowed him considerable power to oversee trading and the flow of gold even when the country was not at war.

Schroder contends that Roosevelt, who later outlawed gold-hoarding, essentially declared war against his own people and used the new law to benefit a secret cabal inside the White House. His successors went on to discreetly increase the executive powers of the federal government even more, using World War II and the Cold War as excuses. As a result, the government apparently now has unlimited control over the economy. Schroder also claims that since Roosevelt supposedly never relinquished his powers, the people have been unwittingly living under martial law for decades.

An RFID is a small computer chip which holds a very small amount of information, typically just a string of numbers, letters or other symbols. The chip has a tiny radio transmitter in it, and when a reader is brought near it, it will broadcast that data so it can be read by the reading device, which contains a radio receiver.

Importantly, RFID’s are not self-powered. They are far too tiny for any kind of battery capacity. Instead, the RFID reader energizes the RFID with an electromagnetic field. When the RFID is placed in the field, it becomes activated and transmits the code it contains. As a result, RFID’s can’t be read from any substansial distance. But they can be read even if they are covered, such as if they are on the inside of a box or embedded in an object.

They also do not have any actual computing power. They can’t receive GPS signals or transmit data, because they lack sensors and receivers. They simply spit out their internal code when energized.

RFID’s are therefore analogous to bar codes. The major difference is that a barcode needs to be visible, on the outside of an item and reading it requires finding it and directing a scanner at it. RFID’s have the advantage of working when obscured and of being readable by running the reader over an item, even if the exact location of the RFID is unknown. They can therefore be used to inventory merchandise while it is still on the shelf or to track multiple items as they move through a system. They can also be embedded in things like credit cards or security passes, allowing them to be used by just holding them near a reader.

RFID’s can also be implanted. A typical RFID implant is about the size and shape of a grain of rice. It contains the chip inside a biologically inert material which is shaped to allow it to be inserted through a very small incision or even injected with a thick needle. A few individuals have chosen to have an RFID implanted as a way of accessing secure systems. This works a lot like biometrics, but may be more robust. When implanted with an RFID, an individual can do things like open locks and sign onto secure computers by just waving their hand infr0nt of a reader. (Presuming, of course, that their hand is where it is implanted.)

This is rare, however. Only a few people have RFID’s in their body and it’s largely just a way of being a super early-adopted. It will earn you some definite nerd points.

Implantable RFID’s are common for pets, however. The RFID acts as a tag that cannot be easily removed or lost. Once implanted, the pet can be tracked back to its owner if it ever gets lost and is picked up by an animal shelter. Animal shelters typically have RFID readers on site and will scan a dog or cat when they are found without identification. If the animal has an RFID, then the unique code it carries is displayed on the reader. This code can be used to find the owners in a database.

But what about mass implantation in people without their consent?

This is a common thread in conspiracy theories. Some have claimed that the government (or some other evil organization) is planning on or has already begun putting RFID’s in the bodies of unsuspecting citizens. Allegedly this is to track their movements and keep tabs on them. Others claim it is part of a mind-control system.

Of course, despite claims that they can be used for realtime tracking, an RFID cannot be used for this at all. As mentioned, it is only energized when it comes in close proximity to the receiver. It could, however, be used to identify individuals when they entered certain areas which are equipped with readers for the RFID’s.

Arguably this could be done without RFID readers at all. A simple fingerprint scanner and identify and individual from a database of fingerprints. However, RFID’s would have the advantage of allowing it to be done more covertly, perhaps without the subjects knowledge.

There is no evidence that this has ever been done, however… or is there?

Recently in one of skeptics groups that I belong to on Facebook someone posted this picture they found on a conspiracy theorist group:

Apparently conspiracy theorists believe that because some people believe or do certain then that makes them a “terrorist”.

This picture is one of the most blatant examples of persecution complex that I have seen in a while and kind of shows the mindset of a conspiracy theorist.

I’m going to go through all of these claims and explain why believing in these things does not make you a domestic terrorist:

You raise/grow your own food

Why would this make you a domestic terrorist? The answer is it doesn’t.

“Definitely a terrorist – did you see the size of that garden in his backyard?”

Millions of people across the country grow their own food in one way or another, be it either in small plots as a hobby (as my dad does) and as a way to have fresh fruits, herbs, and vegetables, or in greenhouses, or in large fields that provide enough food to feed their entire family. Heck, even the White House has it’s own vegetable garden.

If growing your own food made you a domestic terrorist, then why wouldn’t the government just go around to everyones’ houses and destroy their gardens and green houses? Or pass laws that make it illegal to grow your own food? They wouldn’t because growing your own food is harmless and effects no one.

Oppose GMOs

Opposing GMO foods does not make you a terrorist. It might make you someone who doesn’t understand the science behind GMO foods, or someone who has embraced anti-GMO propaganda, but not understanding science or embracing some group’s claims without questioning them doesn’t make you a terrorist.

If opposing GMO foods made you a terrorist then there would be no organic foods in any grocery store or farmers market anywhere, and no laws meant to either label GMO foods or prevent them from being grown or sold would ever be proposed, much less passed.

Prefer natural medicines

“Is that a cinchona tree i’m feeling?”

If this was true then how come the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a official United States government agency that researches and promotes things like natural medicines, even exists?

While the government does restrict multiple types of alternative and natural medicines, this is only because some of them are dangerous, or the manufactures claim it can do something when infact it cannot.

If natural medicines made a person a terrorist then all forms of alternative medicine would be illegal and people who sale it or even promote it would be going to prison.

Refuse vaccinations

Refusing vaccines does not make you a terrorist as there no laws that say that you have to get vaccinated. However, it does make you dangerous to others, as well as your own self as it puts you at greater risk for getting infected with a disease that could kill you, as well as spreading said disease to others who either weren’t vaccinate because they also choose not to (or their parents choose not to have them vaccinated) or a person whom couldn’t get vaccinate for various medical reasons, or someone whom did get vaccinated but the vaccine did not take affect for some reason.

“Is that a a Ron Paul bumper sticker?”

Have a Ron Paul bumper sticker

This does not make you a terrorist, it just makes you someone who likes Ron Paul and refuses to accept the reality that he’ll never be President, and someone who doesn’t know when to take a bumper sticker off of their car.

Skeptoid listeners are always asking for conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. Here’s the best I could come up with.

Ever since the earliest days of Skeptoid, listeners have been asking me for two things: Do an episode on paranormal claims that turned out to be true, and do an episode on conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. For both types of requests, I’ve always answered “Great, just find some for me.” Nothing. Ever. Crickets chirping. So when I went on the Joe Rogan podcast, which has an enormous conspiracy theory following, I asked straight out: Please send me examples of conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. I was buried in email… to the degree that such a thing is possible.

Judging conspiracy theories can be a tricky business. For one thing, they’re often uselessly vague. I can say “The government does things we don’t know about,” and then virtually anything can come out in the news and I can claim to have been right. For another thing, the world is full of real criminal conspiracies, and I can always point to any one of them and claim “Hey, this is a conspiracy theory that was proven true.” So I have a simple pair of requirements that a conspiracy theory must adhere to in order to be considered the type of conspiracy theory that we’re actually talking about when we use the term.

First, it must be specific enough to be falsifiable. This is the fundamental requirement that every scientific theory must comply with to be considered valid. By way of example, compare a vague version of the chemtrails conspiracy theory to a specific disprovable claim. You can’t just say “Some airplanes spray some unknown chemical.” That’s so vague that you could claim you were proven correct the next time a crop duster sprays a field. But if you say “United Airlines tail number NC13327 is equipped to spray VX nerve gas, and that one right there is spraying it right now,” then that’s a claim that can be disproven with a single inspection. You make a claim that specific, you’re proven right, I’ll stand behind you 100%.

Second, it must be known to the conspiracy theorist before it’s discovered by the media or law enforcement. Simply repeating what someone else’s proper investigation has led them to does not constitute developing a theory. Woodward and Bernstein did an intense investigation and put together evidence bit by bit until they had the whole story of the Watergate scandal; at no point did they sit back in their chairs, propose an elaborate conspiracy, then watch as every detail unfolded exactly as they predicted. If you want to impress me with your conspiracy theory, you have to discover it (in detail) before other investigators piece together the proof and make it public for you. Otherwise you’re just claiming credit for reading the newspaper.

So now let’s look at the most common “conspiracy theories proven true” that I was sent:

1. The Gulf of Tonkin

This was overwhelmingly the most common story sent to me from listeners of the Rogan podcast. It was the American excuse to enter the Vietnam War. A small naval battle took place between US forces and North Vietnamese torpedo boats, after which Congress gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to order military action in support of certain Southeast Asian countries who were threatened by Communist forces. Basically, a thinly-veiled authorization for Johnson to go to war with North Vietnam.

USS Maddox in action against North Vietnamese torpedo boats (navy.mil)

The conspiracy part comes from the claim that the naval battle never actually took place, or that it was a fake “false flag” attack by American conspirators trying to give Congress the excuse they wanted. There’s probably a grain of truth to this. There was indeed one real engagement on August 2, 1964, in which planes and ships were damaged on both sides and the North Vietnamese suffered a number of casualties. There’s no doubt there. But it was the second attack two days later on August 4 that was fishy. American forces fired heavily on radar targets only, and nobody ever reported any visual sightings of North Vietnamese forces.

Throughout the day on August 4, as the action was unfolding, Captain Herrick of the destroyer USS Maddox cabled Washington a number of times, and reported in no uncertain terms that he believed there were no enemy forces. This information was public from the beginning. Even as Johnson was drafting his resolution, Senator Wayne Morse was holding public press conferences to reveal that the second attack was without evidence.

Provoking attacks may seem pretty unethical to most of us, but the fact is it’s been a common military tactic since the Romans and the Carthaginians. At no point were the details of the Gulf of Tonkin incident unknown, so it never existed as a conspiracy theory.

2. COINTELPRO

The FBI’s domestic Counter Intelligence Program was a terrible thing from the beginning. It operated since 1956, and also less formally for nearly 50 years before that. Their purpose was to discredit and harm American groups mainly associated with civil rights, characterizing them as hate groups that threatened national security. The program was blown in 1971 when a group of eight men, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into a small FBI office in a perfectly planned and executed raid. They seized some 1,000 documents detailing COINTELPRO operations and mailed them to newspapers. The FBI was unable to identify any of the burglars before the statute of limitations ran out, so they got away with it clean. As a result, the FBI was forced to terminate this often-illegal program.

In 2003, Barbra Streisand frantically tried to censor pictures of her home in Malibu after someone posted them online. In 2003, millions of people saw pictures of Barbra Streisand’s home in Malibu. In what became known as the Streisand effect, attempts to suppress information about something usually backfires and leads to even more publicity for the supposedly secret thing.

The image of Streisand’s Malibu house that led to the naming of the effect. (image: Wikipedia)

There is a strong argument in the weather community that we should ignore the growing number of people who sincerely believe that there is a worldwide governmental conspiracy to control the weather through, among other means, “chemtrails.” Bringing attention to their cause, one may argue, only helps to attract more attention and thereby more adherents to this particular brand of anti-science.

While that is probably true for a small number of people, ignoring the conspiracy theorists only makes them scream louder for attention through the Streisand Effect. The best way to remedy a situation isn’t to bottle it up and pretend that it isn’t happening, but rather to shine light on it and expose the silliness for what it really is.

If you’re not familiar with the chemtrail conspiracy theory, let me fill you in real quick. The thin, wispy clouds left behind by high-flying aircraft are known as contrails, short for condensation trails. These clouds are left behind as a result of the warm, moist exhaust of the plane’s engines meeting the extremely cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere. It’s a similar principle behind why you can see your breath on cold mornings.

Contrails appear and disappear based on the moisture content of the air through which the plane is passing. If the upper atmospheric air is moist, the plane will leave a contrail that could last hours and spread out into a deck of cirrus. If the air is extremely dry, it might not leave a contrail at all.

Since about the mid-1990s, there’s a subset of people who believe that these contrails are really chemtrails, or trails of vaporized chemicals being sprayed into the atmosphere by aircraft that are really flying around with with tanks full of chemicals rather than passengers. These alleged chemtrails are the work of any number of groups: governments, companies, Jews, you name it. The ultimate goal differs depending on whom you ask, but the two biggest strains of thought are that the chemtrails exist to control the weather or make the populace sick.

For most people with a basic level of science education, the idea is absurd, but the conspiracy theorists truly believe that these chemicals are being sprayed to control the weather, make the population sick, or partake in other “geoengineering” activities.

Back to the theorists themselves. Take last week’s post on chemtrails, for example. It attracted a good bit of attention in the conspiracy circles, and quite a bit of ire directed towards me. Most of it is innocuous, with the typical name calling and impassioned cries of “you’re a shill and you’re wrong, we have the real truth!”

Underneath the vitriol, you can sense that there’s something…wrong, for lack of a better way to put it. For the most part these are not the rantings of people who have mental health issues or who are angry or have an agenda, but rather they are scared. They truly, deeply believe that there are people spraying us from above, and they are scared.

When you’re scared, you only accept what you want to hear from people. When the nurse tells you that the needle won’t hurt, you smile because that’s what you want to hear even though you know it’s going to hurt anyway. The conspiracy theorists don’t want to hear that their fears are irrational. They want a noble soothsayer to tell them that they’re not buying into a bunch of manure and that somehow, someway, it’s going to be all right because they have the truth.

It’s difficult to imagine the kind of suffering the family of Grace McDonnell has endured. In some ways it feels disrespectful to even believe you can, given the enormity of what happened to them. The same can no doubt be said for the parents and loved ones of all the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. And yet Grace’s parents, in particular, have been subjected not only to the relentless pain of losing their young daughter, but, recently, to the psychopathic whims of those who believe their child never existed in the first place — those who believe that she was some kind of phantasm concocted by faceless nefarious entities trying to pull a fast one on the American public for who knows what reason. These people, Sandy Hook truthers, are a unique product of our time: self-righteous fools full of misplaced intellectual certitude, bolstered by digital misinformation and the confederacy of like-minded lunatics social media can provide to them.

It was one of these truthers, these conspiracy theorists to whom notions like logic and reason are meaningless, who stole a sign placed at a memorial playground honoring Grace McDonnell in Mystic, Conn. last week. This same person then called Lynn McDonnell, Grace’s still-grieving mother, and told her that he was on to her — that her child had never been real and was merely part of the elaborate hoax that was Sandy Hook. When news of this began making the rounds, most decent people responded as you would expect them to: with visceral outrage. I myself wrote a piece here in response to the provocation that attempted to call-out the monster responsible. It was titled “An Open Letter To Whoever Stole a Sandy Hook Victim’s Memorial Sign” and through The Daily Banter and The Huffington Post it received a good amount of attention and circulation. It even received, it seems, the attention of the person it was aimed at — the person who actually stole the sign.

On Tuesday, my co-worker and friend Bob Cesca called me out of the blue to pass along a pretty disturbing bit of information. He said that he had just taken a call from a relative of his who lives in Northern Virginia, and that this relative told him that a stranger had just shown up at his doorstep demanding to see Bob. The man apparently was hoping to talk to Bob in an effort to contact me. He claimed to be the person who had stolen the sign from Grace McDonnell’s memorial playground. He gave Bob’s relative a local public phone number and asked him to get in contact with Bob who would then get in contact with me and tell me to give him a call. My first thought upon hearing this, after being concerned for the safety of Bob’s family, was that whoever had appeared out of the blue in Northern Virginia looking for me wasn’t really anyone I wanted to speak to. He may have made a surprising — and somewhat disconcerting — amount of effort to get in touch with me, but that didn’t mean he was anything more than a garden variety nutjob who’d read my piece and wanted to take credit for an unconscionable offense in the name of getting attention. But I took down the number and called it as soon as I hung up with Bob.

The person who answered the line sounded lucid, which made it all the more unnerving that what he began saying right off the bat was a panoply of conspiratorial crazy. He asked me if I’d heard of the Illuminati. If I knew about Bohemian Grove. If I understood that my ex-employer CNN was helping to usher in the New World Order. He kept referring to Anderson Cooper as my former boss, for some reason. (I never worked on Cooper’s show and even if I had he wouldn’t have technically been my boss.) He insisted that during CNN’s Sandy Hook coverage, Cooper had held up an owl, which he said was the symbol of Bohemian Grove and those working to bring about a one-world government. When I told him that I personally knew about a dozen people who covered Sandy Hook and were on-scene in the aftermath of the shooting, he demanded to know if those people had actually seen any bodies. He insisted, among other supposed giveaways, that none of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims cried on camera, proving that they either weren’t actually grieving or were paid actors.

“Well, they can’t help but smile,” I said. “You would too if you were a member of the Illuminati.”

Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

Start this video to continue your training:

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

We like to categorize and apply labels. This can be helpful in wrapping your mind around complex reality, as long as you avoid the pitfall of allowing labels to become mental straitjackets.

I often discuss various categories of people who are failing, in one or more important ways, to apply critical thinking. These categories are not meant to be dismissive, but rather to help understand various styles of thinking that lead people astray. For example there are deniers, true-believers, ideologues, and cranks.

Perhaps the most interesting category is the conspiracy theorist. I also find them to be the most consistent in their style of reasoning and argument. I do wonder, however, how much of this consistency is due to and underlying reasoning style and how much is culture. When I get the same fallacious argument over and over again, is that because they are all reading the same source material?

I recently came across a conspiracy website offering advice on how to answer “anti-conspiracy theorists” (their word for skeptics). Anyone who has had a conversation with a conspiracy theorist will recognize the style and tone, and now here it is codified in a primer for budding conspiracy theorists.

The article, however, also reveals the logical errors that underlie the conspiracy belief system. Let’s go through each point.

“You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”

RESPONSE: “Conspiracy Theorist? Now tell me the truth, where did you hear that term…on TV? (Laugh.) …So let me get this straight. Are you saying that men in high positions of power are not capable of criminal activity and telling lies to the general public? Are you really that naive?” (Laugh as you say this.)

As you can see this is a literal script. Right up front we see what I have found to be the typical attitude of the conspiracy theorists – anyone who does not buy their fantastical theories is “naive,” – said with dismissive laughter. This response is also a straw man.

Of course people in power are capable of lying and criminal activity. There are even genuine conspiracies. The recent lane-closing scandal in New Jersey was a conspiracy of at least several civil servants who lied and conspired to abuse their power to punish their political enemies (heedless of collateral damage).

When we talk about conspiracy theorists we are talking about grand conspiracies. These are conspiracies that involved large numbers of people, a vast expanse of power and control, unbelievable secrecy, and often sustained for years or decades. Of course there is no sharp demarcation between a small and plausible conspiracy and a grand conspiracy, but the larger the conspiracy would need to be, the more implausible it becomes. The largest grand conspiracies simply collapse under their own weight.

Ah, but the author has heard this response before and has an answer:

“You’re absolutely right. I agree with you 100%. It is impossible to totally cover up a conspiracy so massive. That’s why I know about it! What you must understand is that they don’t have to cover it up totally. Even a bucket that has a few leaks can still do the job of carrying water from here to there! They only need to fool 80% of the public, which isn’t hard to do when you control the major networks and newspapers.”

Of course the conspiracy theorists have to have learned about the conspiracy, but this entirely misses the point. Conspiracy theorists don’t have actual evidence. They don’t have leaked information, documents, photographs, or any hard or direct evidence of their specific conspiracy theory. As you will see from later responses – they simply believe they have perceived a pattern in events.

This cuts to the heart of the logical fallacies at the core of conspiracy thinking. The conspirators in grand conspiracies have as much power, control, and reach as they need to pull off the conspiracy. Any missing evidence was covered up by the conspiracy. Any evidence against the conspiracy or for a more prosaic explanation was planted. Any events that would seem to undermine the conspiracy theory were clearly false flag operations.

Conspiracy theories are therefore immune to evidence. They are closed, self-contained belief systems that resist their own critical analysis. That is why they are a mental trap.

Often conspiracy theorists are generally smart people (even if they lack certain critical thinking skills). Smart people, however, are good at . . .

Had enough government rhetoric? Tired of following the sheeple? Fed up with believing what THEY want you to believe? Maybe it’s time to branch out and discover THE TRUTH.

If you’re new to the exciting world of conspiracy theories and just can’t decide which paranoid delusion best suits you, then why not use this handy flowchart to find your ideal conspiracy theory. Then you too can go and stick it to THE MAN.

(Click image for larger view)

Click image for larger view

“You know, this explains a lot. Because all my life, I’ve had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was.” Arthur Dent

NB This is not intended to be a complete list, but please don’t let that stop you commenting to let me know what I’ve missed off :)

Unfortunately some individuals take conspiracy theories to a disturbingly excessive extreme.

Ever been accused of being a government plant or paid off by “The Man”? Then you’ve never run into a hardcore conspiracy theorist. Be grateful, because such encounters are often as baffling as they are annoying.

That statement may ruffle the feathers of those who view such a comment as an attempt to make conspiracy theorists look “bonkers” (a favorite accusation of the more paranoid conspiracy theorists…).

However, at some point people need to be able to back up their arguments with facts and not the assertion that a total stranger is being paid to spread misinformation.

There is a big difference between indulging in the belief that things are being purposely hidden by individuals with nefarious purposes and the need to accuse everyone who doesn’t think like you of being on the inside of some master scheme.

It’s important to remember that unethical government and business practices are actually readily acknowledged by the average person as these events are often front page news.

[ . . . ]

So when do conspiracy theories go off the rails?

1.) When they are developed based on unsubstantiated fear and bigotry rather than supporting evidence. At the heart of the more bizarre conspiracies is often the belief that the theorist is in danger.

Really, if what you knew was so dangerous, it’s logical to believe that you’d already be dead instead of living to blab all over Facebook and Reddit from a computer that’s more traceable than you think.

There’s actually no reason to be afraid because…

2.) You’re just not that special. Some people seek to uncover the truth in order to bring a very real wrong to the attention of the world. Others spend all day discussing their opinion on the internet because of a need to convince the world of how much smarter they are than everyone else.

It’s easy to guess which group is useful and proactive and which group is full of ridiculously entitled windbags.

At the end of the day, conspiracy theories are suppose to be centered around a mysterious event. When each discussion is brought around to you and your ego…you’ve lost the plot.

3.) You are not entitled to know everything. Imagine that you knew everything there is to know about the universe and all events from the beginning to the end of time.

The claim: Jim Creek, Oso, ?What it really is: The Jim Creek Naval Radio Station is a Navy very low frequency (VLF) radio transmitter facility. The facility has one building, and the area itself is also used as a outdoor recreational area for Naval personnel and their families and guests.

The claim: Keyport, ?What it really is: The Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Keyport is one of two of the Navy’s undersea warfare facilities, and employs around 1,300 civilian workers.

The base also has it’s own museum, and while there are several large buildings there, none of them appear to be something you would find in a prison camp. Infact they look mostly like industrial buildings.

The facility itself is surround by the city of Brenton, and there is very little room for where it can expand into, and most of the buildings that are there are nothing you wouldn’t find in a facility such as this.

The claim: Everett, ?What it really is: Naval Station Everett is a relatively young Navy base (it became active in 1994) and is the home to several ships, including the USS Nimitz.

The base itself isn’t actually on to much land, and none of the buildings there look like nothing you wouldn’t find on your typical Navy base. Plus, if there was a prison camp being built there it would be unlikely it could be kept out of public view due to the fact that the city Everett is right next to the base.

This is a seven (7) part series by Myles Power debunking the 9/11 conspiracy theory.

This is part 1 – Free fall and how the towers collapsed – in the YouTube playlist.

If you have the time, Myles is worth watching.

Myles Power confronts 9/11 truthers to see if their claims can stand up. In this video he discusses the World Trade Center’s Design to withstand airplane impacts, fuel or oxygen-starved fires, how the World Trade Center’s Collapse, the twin towers falling at free fall speed and the damage to the lobbies.

Basic maths fail
I said if you triple the speed, you get eight times the energy. That should be nine times!

Every hurricane, typhoon, tornado, heat wave, flood, drought and blizzard can thus be traced without any thought by conspiracy theorists to the Air Force site, not far from the Tok Cut-Off, just east of the Richardson Highway. Nothing can stop the tsunami of HAARP hysteria, which complicates the matter of discussing its future.

The $290 million facility is a vestige of the Sen. Ted Stevens earmark era in Alaska, valued by scientists from the military and many of America’s leading universities, who see it as a “cosmic plasma laboratory without walls,” with implications not only for the military but also for basic science and communications.

The interaction of solar radiation with the outer edges of the atmosphere creates the ionosphere, a region that begins about 60 miles above the Earth’s surface that is central to understanding, improving or inhibiting electronic communications, as military leaders told Stevens. The Navy wanted HAARP so it could learn to communicate with submarines worldwide, while the Air Force tried to discover how satellites could be protected from destruction after a high-altitude nuclear blast or powerful magnetic storm.

Today, the biggest change on the horizon for HAARP is back down on earth — the quiet announcement by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) that it wants to pull the plug.

The government’s mind control machine called HAARP!If you don’t believe HAARP can control your mind that’s because the government is usingHAARP to control your mind – causing you to not believe HAARP can control your mind. Seriously.

Now I’ve had a lot of videos on here that were just great, and today I’ve decided to have a look back at what I consider to be the five best videos of the week for 2013:

5. Alex Jones As Alien Lizard Explains Obamacare

Probably every skeptic around the world knows who Alex Jones. While many skeptic bloggers have at least written up a couple of articles to either discredit him and/or show what kind of a fool he is, still by far the best person to discredit Alex Jones and to make him look like a fool… is Alex Jones.

From late 2012 to early 2013 Myles Power created a seven part series that is in my opinion one of the best 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking videos that I have ever seen, and the sixth video in the series, which explains the psychology and mindset of a 9/11 Truther, and infact most conspiracy theorists, could have itself been a stand alone video apart from the series.

For the past four years, Matt, 51, claims that he has been stalked, wiretapped and hacked by thousands of people affiliated with a group that he calls "The Organization." Matt says that he believes his stalkers are "cyber geeks" who have nothing better to do with their time and money than toy with people's lives. Hear the evidence Matt says he has collected â€” and what a private investigator, hired by Dr. Phil, uncovers. Plus, Matt admits to past drug use involving methamphetamines but says that he's been clean for six months. He agrees to both a drug test and a mental evaluation to prove that his claims are valid – what will the results show?

Are you one of those who is eager for the End Time to begin, so you can get raptured away and watch God pour out his wrath on the unrighteous from the catered sky box of Heaven? If not, you probably agree with me that the whole Mark of the Beast thing is pretty stupid. Here are five reasons why.

Step 1: Start with the premise that any tragic incident is a massive, intricate government conspiracy.

Step 2: Denounce any information presented by a mainstream, non-conspiracy source that directly counters the predetermined conspiracy narrative as corrupt and part of the conspiracy.

Step 3: Monitor these same mainstream sources for information that supports the predetermined conspiracy narrative, even if only remotely. Mainstream media reporting mistakes that support your conspiracy (or any conspiracy really) must be treated as rare moments of truth, glimpses inside the Matrix. Any mainstream media reports in favor of the conspiracy should be treated like the word of God. Spam that information everywhere.

Step 4: Imagination is the same thing as undeniable fact. There is nothing wrong with manipulating Youtube videos and using Photoshop to edit information to make it more obvious for the stupid sheeple to understand.

Step 5: Reject the skeptics to the conspiracy theories aggressively. Call them out for being sheep, shills, Cointelpro, paid agents, et cetera. Do not ever doubt yourself, because if you think they are any of these nouns, then it is undeniably true. After all, the conspiracy theory you are trying to wake the world up to is a fact. Only a sheep would think otherwise.

Step 6: Bring up the founding of the Federal Reserve, the Bay of Pigs, The Gulf of Tonkin, and other well known deceptive schemes by the government often (every conversation if need be.) These actions were confessed by government, therefore every other conspiracy theory is true!

Step 7: Cite declassified documents often, as they are invaluable. If the government reports that a secret program was started and ended 60 years ago- DO NOT BELIEVE THEM. The secret programs for sure are still occurring and are now more massive, sinister, and successful than before.

Step 8: Remember that most of witnesses and victims involved in conspiracy event are actors. Medical examiners, emergency responders, the police, reporters, they are almost all in on it. The innocent people caught up in the conspiracy were either killed or have been threatened by the conspirators and are too afraid to come forward (or they possibly never existed to begin with.)

Step 9: Blitz the world with the truth until everyone deletes you on Facebook or you are banned from your favorite web sites. Lay low for a period, regroup at your favorite alternative web sites, get encouragement and reinforcement from the other awakened truth seekers, and start the process all over again with a new conspiracy.

Who is old enough to remember Y2K? I remember it well (translation: i’m old).

Y2K is an acronym for “Year 2000,” or, as it was also known – “The Year 2000 problem, the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K.” (source) It was the moment when the clocks struck 12:00 AM on Janury 1, 2000 and how it might affect every aspect of our lives. Why?

The year 2000 was a problem for many computers because many computer programs stored years using only the last two digits of the year; for example, 1980 was stored as “80”, the year 1999 was stored as “99” and the year 2000 would be stored as “00”.

Do you see the problem? Not only did such systems view the year 2000 as “00”, but they also viewed the year 1900 as “00”. Imagine what would happen to half your programs if your computer suddenly thought the current year (2013) was actually the year 1913. Your calendar program, your watch, your smart phone and many other programs we rely on would suddenly be all wacked out. Imagine what would happen to the banking system if this glitch occurred. Would you be able to access your money? Would all your checks suddenly bounce? (On the other hand, maybe the banks would suddenly give us 100 years of accrued interest. But i digress …)

Now imagine if such a glitch were to occur in bigger systems like nuclear electric plants and nuclear weapons? What might go wrong? This is what had a lot of people in a near state of panic.

Would telephone systems shutdown? Would the electric grid turn off across the country – plunging all of us into darkness for an indeterminant amount of time? Would trains run on schedule? Would the air traffic control system lose control? Would our nuclear arsenal behave in some unpredicted manner and cause WWIII? Would the nuclear arsenal in some other country malfunction and bomb us?

It seemed nobody knew for sure what would – or would not – happen. People were concerned and scared.

Enter my favorite moron – Alex Jones.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the clocks were due to change over to the year 2000, The Alex Jones show engaged in some of the most negligent, egregious and irresponsible scare mongering ever. I don’t know of a worse case than this.

In the 3 hours Jones was on the air, he made every conceivable claim of catastrophe imaginable. He took everything people were fearing about Y2K and he claimed those fears were materializing. Everything from cash machines failing, nuclear power plants shutting down, concentration camps (with shackles) being readied, empty grocery store shelves, gas stations out of gas, Martial Law declared, the military serving search warrants in 77 Texas counties – to an actual nuclear missile attack!!!!!!!!

And did any of this actually occur? No. None of it. People were so frightened they reportedly headed for the hills (literally) and got physically sick.

Bill Cooper’s original broadcast was 3 hours long. In the Alex Jones recording i present below, except for the opening 30 seconds, i have edited out all of Bill Cooper’s narratives so you can hear Alex Jones uninterrupted in all his despicable glory.

As i was going through the audio, i noticed breaks in the Alex Jones audio that i assume were done by Bill Cooper’s editing team in preparation for broadcast. Where ever i believed there was an edit i added a half-second “beep” sound. This is to help avoid confusion as the conversation would sometimes abruptly change topics. So listen for the beeps (you can’t miss them).

Below the audio you will find a complete transcript of notes i made of what to expect in the audio. This will help you follow along. Where ever you see the word “Regurgitation,” that is my own shorthand to indicate it is a previously mentioned point being repeated by Jones – a tactic he uses to give the impression he has a pile of information. Any words [inside brackets] are commentaries i made for myself.

Believe me, this is an audio clip Alex Jones wishes would go away.

Enjoy!

:)

Mason I. Bilderberg.

P.S. If anybody knows where i can find a copy of the full 3 hour Alex Jones Show from 12/31/1999 please let me know.

1:39 Pennsylvania nuclear plant (Limerick Generating Station) has been shut down [implied because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below]

1:49 The shelves (In TX) are empty of water and gas stations are running out of fuel

3:12 The government in Washington D.C. has set up a $50M command bunker that is hooked into FEMA and they can take over all the shortwave (radio), AM/FM radio stations and all television and other broadcast stations

3:34 The police and military [presumably nationwide] are on high alert

3:41 The military are highly visible [presumably in the streets]

3:45 Trains of military equipment moving into Austin, TX

3:53 The airport (Robert Mueller Airport) will be used as a massive holding facility [ala concentration camps]

6:00 They (Russia) have deployed their missiles and submarines against us (America).

6:09 Vladimir Putin, who just took over as Russian President, has “taken the codes off” Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (The Russian nuclear arsenal no longer requires a secret code to initiate a nuclear missile attack on America.)

6:25 Discussing America being hit with a nuclear first-strike and the ensuing annihilation.

7:27 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania Electric Company (PECO), Limerick Generating Station (here and here) was shutdown [presumably because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below].

7:38 Doesn’t challenge a caller paraphrasing (Colonel) Bo Gritz who said, that Russia said, if their (Russia) power goes out they will blame us and they (Russia) would set off their nuclear arsenal.

8:01 The Russians are threatening to nuke us every, single week.

8:25 Currencies around the world are plunging

8:39 Gas stations in America are out of gas

8:58 American’s are standing up as Russia threatens to attack us with nuclear weapons

9:02 Nuclear power plants are being shutdown

9:07 The military is “running around” with the police and the FBI saying terrorism is imminent [the takeover is beginning]

9:25 “They” have activated a powerful, cold war, radar system in the north pole region [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] that is affecting shortwave (radio)

9:46 Military traffic is EVERYWHERE

9:52 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems (presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack) and nuclear systems are up.

10:07 Fresno (California?) is blacked out, he (Jones) is off the internet

10:25 [Scare tactic, Survivalist Commercial]

11:03 “America is under siege right now.”

11:14 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

11:33 Egypt is having a run on the banks

11:45 Regurgitation: The power in Fresno (California?) is down, he is off the internet

11:50 Regurgitation: Cash machines and ATMs in Europe are having problems

12:03 Martial Law signs are posted on highway 65 in Arkansas by the Arkansas Transportation Department

21:18 There are “shackles on the ground, concreted into the ground” at Robert Mueller Airport – like a slave galley.

21:42 New Zealand is having power outages

21:57 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:33 Regurgitation: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us

22:50 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:55 The power is off in 8 different areas across the country

22:58 A lot of cable systems aren’t working

23:01 Satellites are down

23:09 “Minor fault (???) struck two nuclear power plants in Japan just seconds after the clock ticked into 2000 …”

23:25 Anybody near a nuclear power plant should pack up and go someplace else.

23:37 The store shelves are bare in Austin, TX.

23:43 Regurgitation: Gas is running out.

23:44 They’re announcing on the news that, “if you’re bad they’re going to put you in a … they’re going to bolt you to a pipe coming out of the ground at the airport (Robert Mueller Airport) in some cold hangar.”

24:04 “The military is serving search warrants now in 77 Texas counties.”

24:08 Regurgitation: “We got nuclear power plants shutting down.”

24:20 Regurgitation: The Russians are threatening to nuke us RIGHT NOW.

28:36 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

28:57 The night before (12/30/99), anything and everything on the flight line at Selfridge Air National Guard Base was put into the air and was constantly in the air. [i.e. The U.S. is preparing for a nuclear attack]

29:11 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] are turned on.

29:21 The Russians are not the only ones we need to be concerned about … we should worry about the Chinese too.

20:24 We also need to be worried about Germany.

29:58 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

Are you the kind of person who likes to hear to a good conspiracy theory?

Some people simply do not like the discomfort that a conspiracy theory creates. But for others, conspiracy theories are intriguing. They like to explore all of the possibilities that a conspiracy theory presents, in the same way that they like to explore puzzles or mystery novels. Sometimes a conspiracy theory is ridiculous and learning about it is a form of entertainment. Or you may find that the theory is credible and it makes you think. It’s interesting to consider the theory, weigh the evidence and come up with a conclusion.

In the 21st century, one event reigns supreme in the catalog of conspiracy theories: the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States. This event is seared into the nation’s consciousness and significantly affected the entire planet. It seems inevitable that people would cry “conspiracy” about any event with this much impact. However, the conspiracy theories around 9/11 have been strong and consistent.

The whole controversy surrounding 9/11 boils down to one simple question:

Did 19 terrorists cause all of the destruction witnessed on 9/11/2001, or did a group of people in the U.S. government conspire to create that destruction for political gain?

The U.S. government has offered the terrorist explanation, and that is the story that many people believe. A large number of people, however, refuse to believe this “official story.” They believe conspiracy theorists when they say that the U.S. government actually masterminded and executed the attack.

We could spend a great deal of time arguing one side or the other. Instead, we’ll focus on the process. Isn’t it fascinating that there can be two credible explanations for such a complex event, and that both explanations can be so diametrically opposed to one another?

How does a conspiracy theory like this get started? What is required to fuel it into a full-fledged public debate? Can the theory ever be proven? What does the possibility of the theory say about our society? In this article we will explore these questions and many others as we look at the events of September 11.

Conspiracy Theory Basics

Image courtesy AmazonOliver Stone‘s 1991 film “JFK” addresses a controversial version of the events surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

The dictionary defines a conspiracy theory in this way: A theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act. A conspiracy theorist, therefore, is a person who formulates such a theory.

There is a certain negative undertone to the term “conspiracy theory” in today’s society. Detractors will point out that many conspiracy theories contain certain features that undermine their credibility. In this article, however, we will use the term “conspiracy theory” in its neutral sense. We are using it to mean an alternative explanation for an event, as it is defined in the dictionary.

In modern times there have been a number of “conspiracy theories.” One example is the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After the assassination, the government offered its explanation of the events. A large number of people (at one point, more than half of the adult population in the United States) simply do not believe the government’s explanation. This particular conspiracy theory rose to such a high level in the public consciousness that an entire Hollywood movie was made about it: “JFK”, directed by Oliver Stone and released in 1991.

The Kennedy assassination really started the modern “conspiracy theory” movement. This is an event where the “official” government explanation of the crime was openly ridiculed by a large number of “normal citizens.” Many people believe that the Kennedy assassination was carried out as part of a larger government-centered conspiracy, rather than as a random event arranged by a single gunman.

In the same way, a very large number of people do not believe that “terrorists” carried out the events seen on 9/11. Instead, they believe that the government caused those events.

The documents describe an operation known as MILK COOKIES, based out of Fort Meade and run in conjunction with the U.S. Postal Service. COOKIES is the interception of the letters while MILK feeds them through a complex series of algorithms to spot any hidden messages.

Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander had previously testified to Congress in 2011 that the NSA would occasionally collect letters addressed to Santa, but insisted that it was totally accidental and that no one was actually reading or storing them.

The NSA is prohibited from directly monitoring American citizens under both Executive Order 12333 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. However, because the letters are addressed to the North Pole, which falls outside of U.S. territory, they are considered potential foreign intelligence signals which the NSA is authorized to intercept.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former senior administration official defended the program: ”We’re only looking for any unusual presents, like children who ask Santa for pressure cookers, large amounts of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, hyzadrine rocket fuel, things like that. I mean a six-year old with a hammer is bad enough; just try to imagine that same six-year old with a truck bomb.”

The leaked reports show that the NSA also routinely hacked Santa’s Naughty and Nice List for any information on world leaders, and at one point tried to smuggle surveillance devices disguised as lumps of coal into Santa’s sack. They also reveal the existence of a massive NSA data storage center at the North Pole, known as ELFCHELON, which dwarfs even the planned one at Utah, and is capable of storing letters dating back to 1952.

The documents were part of the massive data haul taken by fugitive whistleblower and Playgirl centerfold Edward Snowden, whom the former official referred to as “a very naughty boy.”

Conspiracy theories (CTs) can take many forms and vary widely in popularity, the intensity with which they are believed and their effects on individual and collective behavior. An integrated account of CTs thus needs to explain how they come to appeal to potential believers, how they spread from one person to the next via communication, and how they motivate collective action. We summarize these aspects under the labels of stick, spread, and action. We propose the quasi-religious hypothesis for CTs: drawing on cognitive science of religion, social representations theory, and frame theory. We use cognitive science of religion to describe the main features of the content of CTs that explain how they come to stick: CTs are quasi-religious representations in that their contents, forms and functions parallel those found in beliefs of institutionalized religions. However, CTs are quasi-religious in that CTs and the communities that support them, lack many of the institutional features of organized religions. We use social representations theory to explain how CTs spread as devices for making sense of sudden events that threaten existing worldviews. CTs allow laypersons to interpret such events by relating them to common sense, thereby defusing some of the anxiety that those events generate. We use frame theory to explain how some, but not all CTs mobilize collective counter-conspiratorial action by identifying a target and by proposing credible and concrete rationales for action. We specify our integrated account in 13 propositions.

Introduction

Sigmund Freud

[…] our present purpose is not to debunk yet another CT, but to theoretically elucidate their dynamics and inner logic. Like Freud (1914) considered slips of the tongue as openings to the unconscious mind, Norman (1981) presented action slips as markers of the organization of memory, and Reason (1990) uses errors to gain insights into skilled performance, we consider CTs as occasions to elucidate actual representations of reality as part of human social functioning. Understanding CTs in turn helps us understand the potentially high human costs of over-generalizing agency. Though we need to guard ourselves against creating a conspiracy theory of CTs, our working hypothesis is that CTs have a degree of functional autonomy in modern societies which needs to be understood.

Conspiracy theories have many facets. On the one hand, they constitute cognitive resources that fulfill a need to explain unusual, disturbing events such as disease outbreak, disruptive technology, major scandal, or sudden celebrity death (McCauley and Jacques, 1979; Wagner-Egger et al., 2011). On the other hand, they are narratives that circulate in culture – in mass media, as rumors, in stories (Byford, 2011). These narratives reduce the complexity presented by such events, contain the uncertainty they generate, and translate unspecific anxiety into focused fears (Barrett and Lawson, 2001). CT narratives are also inscribed in the context of antagonistic relations between groups, drawing on recurrent negative views of outgroups to explain events and, sometimes, motivate collective action.

This 56 page document is published by The British Psychological Society and i’ve just begun reading it, so i can’t yet say whether i love it or hate it. But so far i’m liking what i see. It appears to be written in sections – some of which i’ll be skipping – but there looks to be enough great stuff in here to make it worth downloading.

I’m posting an excerpt below for you to read to help you decide whether this is something you might want to peruse.

Special issue: The psychology of conspiracy theories

PRINCESS DIANA was murdered by the British Secret Service because she was pregnant with Dodi Fayed’s baby. The government is adding fluoride to our drinking water in an attempt to weaken the population. Barak Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim and thus ineligible for the Office of the President of the United States.

All of these statements have appeared at some point or other in popular media, debated by politicians, challenged and denied by government departments, and propagated heavily over the internet. A quarter of the UK population believe Diana was assassinated (YouGov, 2012); similarly 25 per cent of Americans think Obama was not born in the US (CBS News/New York Times, 2011). But these statements are not true.

They are examples of a cultural shift in the popularity of the ‘conspiracy theory’; alternative narratives of a world overshadowed by malevolent groups hell-bent on the destruction of civil liberties, freedom and democracy. They suggest that governments, secret religious groups, scientists or private industry (often many of these combined) are responsible for either causing or covering up significant major world events for their own criminal ends.

What is a ‘conspiracy theory’?

[…]

Broadly, psychologists feel that conspiracy theories are worth studying because they demonstrate a particular sub-culture of often heavily political activism that is at odds with the mainstream view. Conspiracy theories are unsubstantiated, less plausible alternatives to the mainstream explanation of an event; they assume everything is intended, with malignity. Crucially, they are also epistemically selfinsulating in their construction and arguments.

[…]

What insight does psychology offer?

Belief systems, cognitive biases and individual differences

But what in particular is it about conspiracy believers that are interesting from a psychological perspective? We find these theories and those who believe them incredibly resilient to counter-argument, driven by an often fanatical belief in their version of the truth, coupled with a heavy political overtone in that their opinions need to be heard. We see an interesting combination of cognitive biases, personality traits and other psychological mechanisms at play in the formation, propagation and belief in conspiracies.

The persistent high-altitude contrails are more than stripes in the stratosphere. They are the stuff of conspiracy theories on par with Area 51, the Roswell UFO crash and who shot JFK.

The chemtrail conspiracy theory claims that some contrails are chemical, biological or otherwise toxic elements sprayed at high altitudes by government agencies _ of some sort _ for the purpose of _ well, something not good. It’s high-altitude crop dusting for nefarious purposes, the tin-foil hat crowd claims.

“The lifetime and behavior of contrails depend on the environmental conditions in which they form,” Petty writes. “Growing contrails result when the humidity at high altitudes is at or above the saturation point with respect to ice. So when condensation is injected in the atmosphere at those altitudes, the microscopic particles of ice don’t simply evaporate, they persist and even grow, and they are spread by the winds into broader patches of cirrus cloud.”

If persistent contrails are more common, Petty suggests, it is because there is more high-altitude airliner traffic and the stratospheric humidity is higher because of the moisture left by the contrails of all that traffic.

For this article I’m throwing in a bit of a curveball from what you’ve come to expect from iLLumiNuTTi.

This article is not about proving or disproving conspiracies. Whether you or I believe the following conspiratorial claims to be true is irrelevant for the purposes of this article. For the sake of argument, just this once, let’s assume all the insanity is true.

Why? Because this article is going to use the beliefs espoused by the conspiracists themselves to point out a peculiar inconsistency between what conspiracists say and what conspiracists do.

The question to be answered is, “Are conspiracists all talk and no walk?”

Here we go . . .

The Fukushima Fallout Is Here And Is Killing Us

Distributed by conspiracists as proof of radioactive water emanating from Fukushima, this image actually had absolutely nothing to do with radiation.(click the image to find out more)

Conspiracists are screaming and yelling about the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima disaster. They are convinced the radioactive fallout has already reached the west coast and other parts of the United States and is killing us, and “they” (who ever “they” are) are covering up the situation.

The crank site Natural News[1] is telling us about “a multitude of strange animal deaths, high radiation readings and other recent anomalies” on the west coast.

Natural News[2] also tells us even the Alaskan coastline is seeing the effects of deadly radiation with a series of “strange animal deaths … including masses of sea lions, sockeye salmon and other sea creatures washing up on the shore,” and “polar bears, seals and walruses … found to have major fur loss and open sores…”

This picture posted by elitedaily.com[3] claims a nationwide increase in mortality rates since the Fukushima disaster:

The cranks at worldtruth.tv[4] are telling us the entire food supply is contaminated with radiation and recommends we avoid the following foods: seafood, water, dairy products, produce and meat.

Why aren’t conspiracists evacuating the west coast?

If conspiracists truly believed this rhetoric you would expect them to be doing something about it, wouldn’t you?

For example, do we see conspiracists packing up their belongings, getting in their cars and evacuating the west coast to save themselves from imminent doom?

What, exactly, are conspiracists doing in response to a crisis they want the rest of us to believe?

Nothing. They are doing absolutely nothing.

The Bush Family Did Business With The Nazis

Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), an investment bank that operated as a clearing house for many assets and enterprises held by German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen. His involvement with UBC was purely commercial, he was not a Nazi sympathizer. (More)

The basic idea is, because the Bush family had business connections with Nazi Germany[5], we should not only hate the Bush family but the Nazi connection is all the proof needed to prove the Bush family are evil, ruthless people – able, willing, wanting and guilty of killing thousands of people on September 11. 2001.

What do you think? Do conspiracists call these companies evil? Do you think conspiracists refuse to work for any of these companies? Do conspiracists refuse to purchase or use products connected with these companies?

Of course not.

Conspiracists tell us to hate the Bush family because of their business connection to Nazi Germany. They say this as they climb into their Ford, GM, Volkswagen or BMW vehicle and drive away on a tank of gas supplied by one of Standard Oil’s successor companies. Once home, they kick off their Hugo Boss shoes, grab some Nestlé cookies (Mmmmmmm!) from their GE refrigerator and wash it all down with a can of Fanta orange soda.

Peace and love or Nazi deathmobile?

Afterwards they fight the matrix masters by posting conspiratorial crap on their blog using a DSL connection routed through an IBM server.

Then before turning in for the night they head on over to Amazon or Ebay and buy another round of conspiracy DVDs and books – published by Random House – using a Chase bank Visa card.

The next time a conspiracist mentions the Bush-Nazi connection, ask them what kind of car they drive.

Conspiracists believe that some trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public and directed by various government officials.[7]

Conspiracists believe the aircraft we see flying across the sky everyday are poisoning us with some kind of nanoparticle spray. Barium and aluminum seem to be the most common elements the conspiracists believe are raining down upon us.

What debilitating health effects do conspiracists believe are befalling us?

So what do you think? If you believed harmful nanoparticles are dropping from the sky causing every conceivable adverse health problem short of stripping the skin off your face, wouldn’t you take steps to protect yourself?

Of course you would.

In real life, to provide adequate protection against the chemicals and biological agents the conspiracists are talking about, a simple surgeon’s mask won’t suffice. You would have to squeeze yourself into a hazmat suit akin to what is depicted in the image to the right.

When is the last time you saw a chemtrail-believing conspiracist walking around in a hazmat suit? Never. Once again, conspiracists don’t behave in a manner consistent with their stated beliefs.

The next time a chemtrail believer screams about those death trails in the sky, comment on how hard it must be to type on a keyboard while wearing those big, bulky hazmat suit gloves.

Government Spying

Conspiracists are an extraodinarily paranoid bunch.

I read a blaring headline the other day, written by a conspiracist, claiming facebook is working hand-in-hand with the NSA to spy on our every move by turning over all our private data, pictures, videos, likes, dislikes, friends list, private messages . . . EVERYTHING! Even our shoe size.

“Where did you read this headline?”, you ask? On facebook – of course. This conspiracist has a facebook timeline brimming with every anti-government rant you could ever imagine. Am I the only one seeing the irony here?

Then there is the conspiracist who sent me an email imploring me to get angry about the NSA spying on our emails. When I pointed out to him that he should encrypt his own emails if his fear was real, he tells me encrypting his emails would just get him flagged by “them.” Excuse me for just a second but – *ahem* *clears throat* – WTF?

Another conspiracist friend refuses to join Facebook because he fears being flagged and tracked by “them.” Yet he runs a blog where he pontificates at great lengths detailing his very own brand of crazy. When I queried him on this seeming contradiction he gave me an explanation that I can honestly say I didn’t understand. It just didn’t make sense – whatever he said.

When a story comes out speculating on the ability of the government to use cell phones to track our movements. Do my conspiratorial friends rid themselves of their cell phones or, at a minimum, wrap their cell phones in foil to prevent the tracking of their phones? Of course not.

Televsions Are For Brainwashing and Mind Control

Conspiracists believe, “that television flicker rates induce alpha brain waves, lulling the brain into a more subconscious state that can be compared to sleep, literally inducing a type of hypnosis within the viewer that makes them more susceptible to suggestion”[10] and “whatever is coming from the TV therefore somewhat bypasses the logical mind and is embedded directly into the subconscious.”[11]

In other words, “they” are using televisions as a “psycho-social weapon[12]” to control our minds and turn us into New World Order (NWO) zombies, instilling us with “a social worldview and value system that is self-centric and is in fact the opposite of what a healthy and enduring society requires.[13]”

Here is my question: If television really is a tool to brainwash and control the mind, wouldn’t the viewing of conspiracy documentaries on a television also have the same mind controlling and brainwashing effect on every conspiracist?

Why don’t conspiracists accuse the makers of their wack-a-doo conspiracy DVDs of brainwashing?

If conspiracists sincerely believed their own hype, they would cease watching all television programs regardless of the content. But they don’t and they won’t.

I think you get the idea.

In order to take a conspiracist to task you needn’t know what they know to counter their arguments, you need only ask them, “What are you doing about your claimed belief?”

I ask this very question of Alex Jones regarding chemtrails. Of all the conspiracists who have the resources to settle the chemtrail debate once and for all, it’s Alex Jones. If Alex Jones really believes “they” have been spraying us for almost 20 years, why doesn’t Alex reach into his own wallet and pull out some of that $$$$$ he earns from DVD sales and rent a plane, pay a pilot, hire a certified forensics lab, fly into the suspicious clouds and contrails, conduct all the necessary air sampling while following all proper chain of custody procedures and end this debate once and for all? Why? Because it would kill those DVD sales.

Throughout this year there were a lot of new conspiracy theories going around. Some of them were scary. Some of them were weird. And some of them were just bizarre, absurd, and dumb to the point where one would either have to laugh at them, or pull their hair out in frustration.

The following list are ten of what I feel are the strangest and most bizarre and/or absurd conspiracy theories of 2013:

10. Robert Sarvis was a Democratic plant to help Terry McAuliffe win the Virginia gubernatorial election.

(Author’s note: being that I am from Virginia, I just felt that I had to mention this one)

In the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial election there were a lot of accusations that went back and forth (some true, some not) but one of the biggest accusation didn’t come during the election, but afterwards. The accusation that I’m talking about is the one that claims that Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis was actually a shill or plant by the Democrats inorder to steal votes away from Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli and to help guarantee victory for Terry McAuliffe.

Now as plausible as this may sound, there are just two problems with this: First there is no guarantee that the people who voted for Sarvis would have voted for Cuccinelli, and second most of the polls before the election showed that McAuliffe had an over 50% lead, and thus a spoiler candidate would not have been needed inorder to win. Also, besides those facts and the fact that there is no actual evidence that Sarvis was a Democratic plant, it’s just as likely that Sarvis actually took away votes from McAuliffe as it is from Cuccinelli.

While conspiracy theories against GMO foods are nothing new, what is new is that the Anti-GMO movement now seems to be focusing their claims on one company: Monsanto.

From what I can tell from their claims Monsanto pretty much controls the FDA, the farming industry, the food industry, Obama, the media, the U.S. Supreme Court, law enforcement, any blog that debunks the anti-GMO movement’s claims, all the science organizations, and that Monsanto is responsible for every atrocity committed in the world since World War Two.

According to many in the anti-GMO movement Monsanto does all of this inorder to sell you a product that (insert the anti-GMO claim of your choice).

On April 15 one of the worst terrorist attacks in the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks occurred at one of the largest sporting events in the U.S., the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed, and 264 people were injured, many of who also lost limbs, or were otherwise permanently maimed in some way. Also, like clock work, conspiracy theories about the bombing started to be posted all over the internet within minutes of the attack.

The most common of the claims were that it was a false flag attack, and then later de-evolved into stranger conspiracy theories in that both the suspects, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were under some kind of government mind control, right on down to the most absurd claim of there being no attack at all and that the whole thing was staged and that no one was actually hurt or killed.

Besides the fact that all of these claims were absurd on face value alone and were quickly debunked, they were also very disrespectful and just plain disgusting.

Over the summer actress Amanda Bynes began engaging in behavior that ranged from bizarre to down right dangerous. This behavior of her’s eventually lead to her being involuntarily committed into psychiatric care.

Now to most people this looks like a simple enough case of a young woman whom is mentally ill and whom’s mental illness has caused her to act out in bizarre and dangerous ways. To a conspiracy theorist on the other hand it’s a clear case of Illuminati mind control.

The main theory that is going around is that Amanda was being groomed by the Illuminati as part of a youth indoctrination program, and that she had decided to break away from them. When Amanda did allegedly break away from them one of two things happen: Either that the indoctrination was so intense that she could not function on her own and her mind snapped, or she was driven insane via remote mind control.

While this explanation kind of makes sense in a weird way, the one theory behind her behavior that makes even more sense is that she is either schizophrenic or bi-polar. Combined with her age, and her escalating erratic behavior over the past few years, this makes a lot more sense than a couple of conspiracy theories that range from being far fetched to pretty much impossible.

When the Xbox One and all of it’s feature were announced there were many concerns (some legit, some not) but one of the biggest concerns that in itself became a conspiracy theory is that the new gaming counsel (through it’s inbuilt motion sensing Kinect system) can see you naked, even with your clothes on. The reason behind this claim is due to a photo of a test subject seen through the view of the Kinect that allegedly shows his ding-dong, despite the fact that he is wearing clothes.

As it turns out that wasn’t the man’s private parts, but was actually a fold in his pants that people mistook for his you-know-what. Although it should be noted that the Xbox One can see you naked… if you’re actually playing a video game infront of it while naked (and if that’s your thing then have fun playing with it… the Xbox One I mean).

As most of you probably already know, Paul Walker of “‘The Fast and the Furious‘ movie franchise and a friend identified as Roger Rodas died in Southern California after the Porsche they were in crashed violently into a tree, his rep confirmed to the Daily News. Police said speed was a factor.” (nydailynews.com)

That’s it. This wreckage looked like another wreckage and, in his scientific opinion, a tree couldn’t have damaged the car. Therefore, the only logical conclusion MUST BE: An Obama Drone Assassination!

I’m going with the tornado theory. Paul Walker’s car was struck by a very focused tornado funnel. That’s my final answer. And all the conspiracists can’t argue with me because i’m using their own method of deductive insanity.

There is an internet radio broadcast called The Bob Charles Show that broadcasts 5 days a week at various times.

I mention this show because i’m having fun sifting through their audio archive listening to some of the craziest conspiratorial-woo crap you’ll find anywhere. This is pure entertainment. Where else can you find this kind of rambling nonsense?

To whet your appetite, below is an excerpt from the 11/10/13 The Bob Charles Show that i had transcribed.

Do note, i have highlighted every instance where these conspiracists use the catch-all, abstract phrase “they” to reference the faceless, nameless matrix masters.

Conspiracists are notorious for blaming “them” or “they” for every woe, unanswered question or mystery in the world.

You want to piss off a conspiracist? When they refer to “they,” ask them who “they” are. Two days ago a conspiracist told me “they” were the FBI, NSA, CIA, etc. I asked him to stop blaming buildings and get more specific (Who? What? When? Where?). He went nuts. To him i was suddenly one of “them.”

If you hear “they,” ask for specific names, dates and locations. Who (specifically) talked to who (specifically)? Who (specifically) is a member of the illuminati? Who (specifically) within the NSA? Who (specifically) within the government? Who (specifically) within the pharmaceutical industry? Who (specifically)?

No more blaming buildings and talking in abstract concepts about nameless, faceless people.

With the passing of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy last week, and the accompanying fusillade of documentaries purporting to prove there was a conspiracy behind it, we might expect (and hope) that cabalistic conjecturing will wane until the next big anniversary.

Don’t count on it. A poll this month found that 61% of Americans who responded still believe that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, despite the fact that the preponderance of evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin.

Why do so many people refuse to accept this simple and obvious conclusion? The answer: psychology.

There are three psychological effects at work here, starting with “cognitive dissonance,” or the discomfort felt when holding two ideas that are not in harmony. We attempt to reduce the dissonance by altering one of the ideas to be in accord with the other. In this case, the two discordant ideas are 1) JFK as one of the most powerful people on Earth who was 2) killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone loser, a nobody. Camelot brought down by a curmudgeon.

The most powerful person on Earth was killed by a nobody. This doesn’t feel right. To balance the scale, conspiracy elements are stacked onto the Oswald side.

That doesn’t feel right. To balance the scale, conspiracy elements are stacked onto the Oswald side: the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson and, in Oliver Stone’s telling in his film “JFK,” the military-industrial complex.

Cognitive dissonance was at work shortly after Princess Diana‘s death, which was the result of drunk driving, speeding and no seat belt. But princesses are not supposed to die the way thousands of regular people die each year, so the British royal family, the British intelligence services and others had to be fingered as co-conspirators.

By contrast, there is no cognitive dissonance for the Holocaust — one of the worst crimes in history committed by one of the most criminal regimes in history.

A second psychological effect is the “monological belief system,” or “a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network,” in the words of University of Kent researchers Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a 2012 paper titled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.” A conspiracy theory, they wrote, is “a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.”

With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event.” For example . . .

To believe that the US government planned or deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks, you’d have to posit that President Bush intentionally sacrificed 3,000 Americans. To believe that explosives, not planes, brought down the buildings, you’d have to imagine an operation large enough to plant the devices without anyone getting caught.

And yet, as Slate’s Jeremy Stahl points out, millions of Americans hold these beliefs. In a Zogby poll taken six years ago, only 64 per cent of US adults agreed that the attacks “caught US intelligence and military forces off guard”. More than 30 per cent chose a different conclusion: that “certain elements in the US government knew the attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives”, or that these government elements “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks”.

How can this be? How can so many people, in the name of scepticism, promote so many absurdities?

The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really sceptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favour a world view, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.

Conspiracy chatter was once dismissed as mental illness. But the prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history. As you’d expect, distrust turns out to be an important factor. But it’s not the kind of distrust that cultivates critical thinking.

In 1999, a research team headed by Marina Abalakina-Paap, a psychologist at New Mexico State University, published a study of US college students. The students were asked . . .

Modern conspiracy movements come and go so quickly that it can be hard to keep up with the new threats and concepts that get tossed around social media and the water cooler. So here’s a quick and easy list of some of the basic ideas you’ll often see related to conspiracy theories and popular pseudoscience. And because everyone likes pedantic, grade-school learning tropes, I did it in the form of the alphabet.

A is for Agenda 21, a non-binding and unenforceable United Nations policy paper written over two decades ago, devoted to promoting sustainability and smart growth. Some conspiracy theorists, at the prompting of Glenn Beck, have decided that Agenda 21 is actually a plot to depopulate rural areas, enact a green genocide and cram the survivors into Soviet-style urban clusters. It’s really not, and you can read the “sinister plan” for yourself online.

B is for Bankster, a portmanteau of “banker” and “gangster.” This term has caught on as a reference to the wealthy financiers and global elites who are supposedly controlling every element of society and government, enslaving the rest of us through their octopus tentacles of Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Government. Often, the term is modified as “foreign bankster,” which usually just means “Jews.”

C is for Chemtrail, a spray of noxious chemicals, biological agents meant to control the population, weather modification material or unspecified “toxins” left behind by airplanes acting under the control of the global elite. No compelling evidence of chemtrails exists, and almost everything used as proof of them is either fake or out of context. In reality, “chemtrails” are either contrails left by aircraft when the heat of their exhausts meets cold air, or simply unusual looking clouds.

D is for Denialism. No matter what beliefs are held by the mainstream and supported by solid evidence, you can always find someone who thinks we’re being lied to about them. Everything from the existence of AIDS to the moon landings to vaccine safety has an accompanying movement that says “everything we know is wrong” about these subjects, usually with nothing to prove it. Most of these movements are tied together, because if you’re going to be contrarian, you might as well be really contrarian.

E is for Energy. Many conspiracy theorists believe there is a massive plot by the government and oil companies to suppress free energy machines, which would break the oil industry’s grip on us and deliver unlimited power. As evidenced by the free availability of patents and myriad videos showing the non-existent miracles worked by these machines, this is not true. The laws of physics dictate that free energy can not exist, so there is no need to suppress it.

F is for False Flag. In political terms, a false flag is an action fabricated as a pretext for war. False flags are real things that have happened, but conspiracy believers see them in virtually every terrorist attack and shooting of the last century, all done as a pretext for Bankster-controlled politicians to make money and take away our rights. One false flag consistently cited by conspiracy theorists is Operation Northwoods, a US plan to gin up a war with Cuba. It was pooh-poohed by President Kennedy and never implemented.

HAARP, complete with SINISTER CLOUDS.

G is for Geoengineering. Like false flags, geoengineering is a real thing that has been turned into something else by conspiracy theorists. They see geoengineering as a way the global elite will reshape the planet to enslave us and keep us sick, using chemtrails, “weather warfare” and man-made natural disasters like typhoons and earthquakes. In reality, geoengineering is being studied as a way to reverse the effects of climate change (see Denialism.)

H is for HAARP, short for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. This was a research station in Alaska that used high frequency antennae to bounce radio signals off the ionosphere. Some see HAARP as a powerful weapon capable of weather modification, earthquakes, massive storms and electromagnetic blasts. HAARP has no such actual powers and ionospheric research has no relation to earthquakes or hurricanes. In addition, HAARP closed in March 2013, due to funding issues.

I is for Illuminati, a catch-all term for almost anyone wealthy, powerful or wealthy and powerful. Historically, the Bavarian Illuminati was a secret society founded in 1776 to oppose religious influence over secular life. It lasted less than a decade before being banned. The pop culture version of the Illuminati was remade from a combination of antisemitism, anti-Communism and fear of One World Government. No evidence exists that this Illuminati is real, despite virtually every celebrity, executive and politician posited to be a member.

Alex Jones: wrong pretty much all the time about pretty much everything.

J is for Jones, Alex. The popular radio host, film producer and founder of conspiracy clearing house Infowars.com is seen as the “face” of the conspiracy theory movement. Jones helped mainstream the view that a cadre of governments and businesses serve as a global elite, running the planet for their own benefit. His media platforms are a haven for those looking to “wake up” the rest of us to what’s “really going on,” despite being wrong pretty much all the time about pretty much everything. He’s also really entertaining to watch be interviewed.

K is for Kennedy, John, the center of a 50 year conspiracy theory regarding his assassination. Dozens of ideas have been put forth as to who “really” killed JFK, from the CIA to the Corsican Mafia to a nebulous group of businessmen to a Secret Service agent to Jackie Kennedy. Despite the weight of research on the subject (as many as 2,000 different books alone) and the staggering percentage of Americans who reject the “official story,” no theory has emerged with enough compelling evidence to displace Kennedy being shot by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.

L is for Logical Fallacies, the poor arguments used in an attempt to make points lacking supporting evidence. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the many fallacies used against skepticism, such as the Gish Gallop (238234 Reasons Vaccines Are Evil, And You Can’t Possibly Respond to Them All), the argument from authority (we should listen to Dr. Oz about nuclear power because he’s a doctor) and post hoc rationalization (I caught the flu after I got the flu shot, therefore the flu shot did it). Good lists of fallacies can be found here and here.